Under the generous chairmanship of Professor Dr. med. Werner Kaufmann we organized the international symposium on "VASODEPRESSOR HORMONES IN HYPERTENSION - PROSTAGLANDINS AND KININS" held in Nuremberg (FRG) as an official satellite symposium to the Meeting of the International Society of Hypertension 1986. This supplement brings together the most interesting papers presented at this symposium. In the past there were hundreds of publications in both fields, the prostaglandins and the kallikrein-kinins and there were a lot of information indic~ting that these two systems influence each other strongly. But it is not at all clear till today which role these two systems play in physiological or even pathophysio­ logical regulation of systemic blood pressure. So it was aim of this symposium to bring the scientists of these two fields together to discuss blood pressure regulation in respect of the prostaglandin and kallikrein-kinin system. The authors of the presented papers provided new findings, an overview of their own work, and their hypotheses in this field. We would like to thank the contributors for their excellent papers and scientific discussion. We pay particular credit to the Birkhauser Verlag AG, Basel, Switzerland, for their kind cooperation, and express particular thanks to Mrs Renate Wiesmann and Mrs Renate Cawello for writing the manuscripts. Our gratitude goes to Schwarz GmbH, Monheim (FRG) wi thout their sponsorship this symposium' and book would not have been possible. July, 1987 G. Bonner O. A. Carretero H. Kueppers J.